Veena Dubal

Last updated
Veena B. Dubal
Veena Dubal.jpg
Education Stanford University (BA)
University of California, Berkeley (JD, PhD)
Scientific career
Institutions University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
Clayman Institute for Gender Research
Thesis Wage Slave or Entrepreneur?: Contesting the Dualism of Legal Worker Identities

Veena B. Dubal is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. Dubal's scholarship on gig work has been widely cited.

Contents

Early life and education

Dubal studied international relations and feminist studies at Stanford University and graduated with honours in 2003. She attended to the University of California, Berkeley for her Juris Doctor, which she completed in 2006. While in law school Dubal was a community activist focused on anti-war campaigns. She was a part of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. [1]

Dubal was a Fulbright Program scholar in India from 2007 to 2008. After graduating, she was a Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow and public interest attorney at the Asian Law Caucus until December 2012. Dubal earned a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley in 2014. [2] Her doctoral research used historical and ethnographic methodologies to study San Francisco taxi workers. [3]

Research and career

After earning her PhD, Dubal joined the Clayman Institute for Gender Research as a postdoctoral fellow. [4] Dubal was appointed to the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 2015. [5] Her research considers the impact of digital technologies on the lives of their workers, the relationship between law, precarious work and identity and the role of law in solidarity movements. [6]

Dubal is a critic of big tech and the rise of harmful artificial intelligence. [7] She has described the transformation of service work following the great recession as Uberisation . She has investigated the taxi economy in San Francisco pre- and post-Uber, and how the everyday experiences of drivers changed with commodification of medallions, the leasing system, and the de-regulation following the legalization of TNCs. [8]

Dubal, who WIRED magazine called "an unlikely star in the tech world" has called for the regulation of tech companies that promote a gig economy by misclassifying their workers as independent contractors. [9] [10] [11] She was one of 75 professors across the United States who wrote to the California Legislature to support Assembly Bill 5 and to advocate that gig companies like Uber and Lyft not get a special interest carveout from California employment laws. In September 2019 California passed the law, which codified a California Supreme Court decision. [12] [13]

Journalism and advocacy

Dubal has studied and written about the rise of the technology labor movement through organized protests, [14] [15] such as the 2018 Google walkouts [16] and 2019 Uber strike. [17] Dubal has written for The Guardian , [18] The Los Angeles Times [19] and Slate . [20] Dubal has advocated for cities to restrict facial recognition technologies in an effort to minimize citizen surveillance and inappropriate data collection. [21] Dubal served on the board of directors of the Gravel Institute, a progressive organization. [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of California, San Francisco</span> Public university in California, US

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of California</span> Public university system in California

The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic centers abroad. The system is the state's land-grant university.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California State University</span> Public university system in California, US

The California State University is a public university system in California, and the largest public university system in the United States. It consists of 23 campuses and seven off-campus centers, which together enroll 457,992 students and employ 56,256 faculty and staff members. In California, it is one of the three public higher education systems, along with the University of California and the California Community Colleges systems. The CSU system is officially incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University, and is headquartered in Long Beach, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of California College of the Law, San Francisco</span> Public law school in San Francisco, California

The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco is a public law school in San Francisco, California, United States. It was previously known as the University of California, Hastings College of the Law from 1878 to 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uber</span> American ridesharing and delivery company

Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 150 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It facilitates an average of 28 million trips per day and has facilitated 47 billion trips since its inception in 2010. In 2023, the company had a take rate of 28.7% for mobility services and 18.3% for food delivery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyft</span> American ride-sharing company

Lyft, Inc. is an American company offering mobility as a service, ride-hailing, vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, rental cars, and food delivery in the United States and select cities in Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dynamic pricing model based on local supply and demand at the time of the booking and are quoted to the customer in advance, and receives a commission from each booking. Lyft is the second-largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shared transport</span> Demand-driven vehicle-sharing arrangement

Shared transport or shared mobility is a transportation system where travelers share a vehicle either simultaneously as a group or over time as personal rental, and in the process share the cost of the journey, thus purportedly creating a hybrid between private vehicle use and mass or public transport. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, Bicycle-sharing systems, ridesharing companies, carpools, and microtransit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UC Berkeley School of Law</span> Public law school in Berkeley, California

The University of California, Berkeley School of Law is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. The school was commonly referred to as "Boalt Hall" for many years, although it was never the official name. This came from its initial building, the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, named for John Henry Boalt. This name was transferred to an entirely new law school building in 1951 but was removed in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Waymo</span> Autonomous car technology company

Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

The sharing economy is a socio-economic system whereby consumers share in the creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, and services. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology and the Internet, particularly digital platforms, to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ridesharing company</span> Online vehicle for hire service

A ridesharing company, ride-hailing service, is a company that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire that, unlike taxis, cannot legally be hailed from the street.

A robotaxi, also known as robot taxi, robo-taxi, self-driving taxi or driverless taxi, is an autonomous car operated for a ridesharing company.

Sidra Stich is an American art historian, museum curator, and travel writer based in San Francisco.

Leslie Dreyer is a Bay Area-based artist, educator and organizer. She designs creative action, art, and media strategies for social justice initiatives, largely focused on global real estate speculation, hyper-gentrification, displacement, and the tech industry's impact on housing and inequality. The collaborative work often fuses public installation, guerrilla theatre, tactical media and smart mobs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Haney</span> American politician

Matthew Craig Haney is an American politician from San Francisco currently serving as a member of the California State Assembly from the 17th district, covering the eastern portion of the city. A progressive member of the Democratic Party, Haney had represented District 6 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2019 to 2022 and previously served as a commissioner on the San Francisco Board of Education from 2013 to 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gig worker</span> Independent on-demand temporary workers

Gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-call workers, and temporary workers. Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients.

California Assembly Bill 5 or AB 5 is a state statute that expands a landmark Supreme Court of California case from 2018, Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court ("Dynamex"). In that case, the court held that most wage-earning workers are employees and ought to be classified as such, and that the burden of proof for classifying individuals as independent contractors belongs to the hiring entity. AB 5 extends that decision to all workers. It entitles them to be classified as employees with the usual labor protections, such as minimum wage laws, sick leave, and unemployment and workers' compensation benefits, which do not apply to independent contractors. Concerns over employee misclassification, especially in the gig economy, drove support for the bill, but it remains divisive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2020 California Proposition 22</span> Gig economy workers employment status ballot initiative

Proposition 22 was a ballot initiative in California that became law after the November 2020 state election, passing with 59% of the vote and granting app-based transportation and delivery companies an exception to Assembly Bill 5 by classifying their drivers as "independent contractors", rather than "employees". The law exempts employers from providing the full suite of mandated employee benefits while instead giving drivers new protections:

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the utilization of algorithmic bias to enable wage discrimination where workers are paid different wages for the same work.

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